Several techniques devised to help smokers quit have met with varying degrees of success. One treatment, sensory deprivation (SD), has shown promising results even among addictive smokers, the most difficult group to help. Studies have shown that the symptoms of smoking withdrawal seem less severe to persons given a placebo medication to which they can attribute their symptoms. The long-term effects of the SD treatment may be due in part to the psychological impact of and the fact of having successfully completed the first and most difficult day of abstention. To test the hypothesis of misattribution of symptoms, we propose to analyze data previously collected during prolonged SD experiments in which smoking was not allowed. Variables of interest include: smoking status of test subject; a pre-experiment measure of manifest anxiety or other distress-proneness; the extent to which the subject reported symptoms generally associated with nicotine withdrawal; and the frequency with which the smoker reports missing smoking. After statistically controlling for anxiety and distress-proneness, we would seek to determine whether smokers report more withdrawal-like discomfort in SD than nonsmokers. Evidence of greater withdrawal-type symptoms among the smokers combined with a low frequency of desire for cigarettes would strongly suggest that withdrawal symptoms were occurring and were being attributed to something other than the absence of nicotine.